Boarding schools have a devastating impact on
society, says Charles Spencer
Brother of Diana reveals he was sexually abused as a
child at Maidwell Hall and that a nanny would beat him and his sister
Jamie
Grierson
Sun 17 Mar
2024 17.26 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/mar/17/boarding-schools-impact-charles-spencer
Charles
Spencer, the younger brother of Diana, Princess of Wales, has said the
brutalising effect of boarding schools on people who have come to power has
been devastating for society.
Spencer was
speaking on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme after the release
of his memoir, A Very Private School, in which he revealed he was sexually
assaulted as a child at the boarding school Maidwell Hall in Northamptonshire.
In an
extract, the 59-year-old detailed the sexual assaults and beatings he
experienced at Maidwell, saying they had left him with lifelong “demons”.
He said he
was abused by an assistant matron at the school when he was 11, leaving him
with such trauma that he self-harmed over the notion that she might leave the
school.
Elsewhere
in the book, Spencer suggested the impact of public school culture had made a
difference to some of the people who lead the country.
When asked
about this, he told Kuenssberg: “When it goes really wrong, as it did in
Maidwell in the 1970s, you’re going to come out very damaged, and I know I did.
And I actually say in the book, you know, to survive that, a small but
important part of me had to die. And I think that’s true, you know, there was a
softness that had to be trampled on, because otherwise it would be too painful.
“So if you
extrapolate that and think of the damage it’s done to other people who have
ended up in powerful positions – and I’m talking over the centuries, not just
contemporaries – they have to have had their view of what’s acceptable
behaviour, what other people mean in terms of empathy, they have to have been
brutalised.
“And I
cannot think that all of the effects of these schools can have been good for
society, or for the empire, or whatever we were in control of at the time. I
think it’s been devastating in some ways.”
In the
wide-ranging interview, he revealed that his and Diana’s childhood nanny would
“crack our heads together” if they misbehaved, with a “cracking crunch” that
“really hurt”. He said it emphasised the “disconnect of parents”, but he did
not criticise his mother and father, saying it had been “normal” to “leave it
to the nanny to deal with”.
He claimed
that another nanny punished his two older sisters by “ladling laxatives down
them”.
In his
memoir, Spencer described reliving his experiences at boarding school as “an
absolutely hellish experience”, writing: “I’ve frequently witnessed deep pain,
still flickering in the eyes of my Maidwell contemporaries.”
On the
matron, Spencer wrote: “There seemed to be an unofficial hierarchy among her
prey … She chose one boy each term to share her bed and would use him for
intercourse.
“Her
control over mesmerised boys was total, for we were starved of feminine warmth
and desperate for attention and affection.”
As a result
of the experience, Spencer said, he lost his virginity to an Italian sex worker
at the age of 12.
“There was
no joy in the act, no sense of arrival, no coming of age,” he wrote. “I believe
now that I was simply completing the process set in motion by the assistant
matron’s perverted attention.”
He also
said he was beaten with the spikes of a cricket boot by the school’s Latin
master.
In a
statement, Maidwell Hall said it was “sorry” about the experiences Spencer and
some others had had at the school.
“It is
difficult to read about practices which were, sadly, sometimes believed to be
normal and acceptable at that time,” it said. “Within education today, almost
every facet of school life has evolved significantly since the 1970s. At the
heart of the changes is the safeguarding of children and promotion of their
welfare.”
SEE ALSO:
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https://tweedlandthegentlemansclub.blogspot.com/2019/08/a-clique-of-pseudo-adults-britains.html
https://tweedlandthegentlemansclub.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-riot-club-official-trailer.html
In 1975, as
a child, Richard Beard was sent away from his home to sleep in a dormitory. So
were David Cameron and Boris Johnson.
In those
days a private boys' boarding school education was largely the same experience
as it had been for generations: a training for the challenges of Empire. He
didn't enjoy it. But the first and most important lesson was to not let that
show.
Being separated
from the people who love you is traumatic. How did that feel at the time, and
what sort of adult does it mould?
This is a
story about England, and a portrait of a type of boy, trained to lead, who
becomes a certain type of man. As clearly as an X-ray, it reveals the make-up
of those who seek power - what makes them tick, and why.
Sad Little
Men addresses debates about privilege head-on; clearly and unforgettably, it
shows the problem with putting a succession of men from boarding schools into
positions of influence, including 10 Downing Street. Is this who we want in
charge, especially at a time of crisis?
It is a
passionate, tender reckoning - with one individual's past, but also with a
national bad habit.
© Richard
Beard 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021
Listen on
your Booktopia Reader App
Richard Beard Q&A: ‘This is a very
private-school idea – you just have to live with social injustice’
Author
Richard Beard.
Author
Richard Beard. Photograph: Urszula Soltys
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/aug/08/public-schoolboys-boris-johnson-sad-little-boys-richard-beard?CMP=fb_gu&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR0u-1O8sYoxjXRP0qkEL9ImB_5ecE0AcmsJKwqemcxWrUANP_bHQOPYnmM#Echobox=1628416840
How has
your schooling affected you?
My relationship
with my own emotions was distorted from the moment it was taken as gospel truth
that it was good for me to be separated from my family aged eight. You’re doing
something that feels terrible, but everyone tells you it’s good. That leads to
further dislocations, which allow individuals to become fractured, divided, and
very good at leading a double life.
Boris
Johnson and David Cameron attended similar schools at a similar time. How do
you think it shaped them?
In so many
ways. Almost every day I read the paper and think, yes, I recognise that.
Recently, it’s the idea that you just have to live with stuff – with Covid, for
example. Just as at school you just had to live with your parents leaving you
behind, with the daily authoritarianism, with not going home for weeks at a
time. This is a very private-school idea – you just have to live with social
injustice.
There’s
also the extensive training in dissembling and putting up a front. I don’t get
any sense of authenticity from them, or genuine empathy. At some point, you
start feeling sorry for them.
Do you feel
sorry for them?
Well I hope
it’s there in the title of the book – it’s not just the pejorative name-calling
of sad little men. I know that they had to create their own coping mechanisms.
And those coping mechanisms are what you see in these behaviours, which do seem
to me to start out from the sadness of little boys out of their depth, but who
learned early in their lives how to hide that.
Johnson has
been described as confusing and contradictory, but you say that’s precisely
what boarding school produces… shapeshifters with fluid identities.
That
connection is made quite clearly by John le Carré – he often links this type of
education to the vocation of being a spy. I do think it’s different now,
because we’ve grown up through a period of peace and prosperity, and we haven’t
had that tempering that previous generations have had, when confronted by major
world events – being goaded into seriousness, but also into empathy for other
people in the country.
You’re
pretty unambiguous about the hellishness of boarding school. Why do parents
send their children to these places?
It’s not
hellish on a daily basis. On the surface, it seems quite the opposite,
especially to the parents. When you see the tennis courts and the swimming
pools it looks fantastic. The problems are underneath the surface.
But a lot
of these parents have gone through it themselves, so they are well aware of the
damage it creates…
If you’re
now in a position to send your children to private school, it means you either
managed your inheritance wisely or you’re a QC or an investment banker or the
prime minister and you can say: “What a great success!” It’s very hard to fight
back against that surface, against that lie.
Did you
ever consider sending your kids to private schools?
No. I
wanted the kids to be coming home at night, and I wanted them to be in
co-education.
Did that
extend to sending them to state schools?
I lived
abroad a lot, where they were in lycées, French-speaking schools. In this
country, to keep the language going, that meant finding what’s now a free
school, so a state school but not a classic comprehensive.
Do you feel
that by writing this book, and facing up to your schooling, you’ve exorcised it
in some way?
I think
facing and unpacking a past life is the antidote to some of its effects. But I
was deeply formed by these experiences. The lies create habits for life which
are, in many cases, detrimental to living well, and that takes a long time to
undo.
Interview
by Killian Fox
‘Everyone who was not us, a boy at a private boarding school from the late 70s to the early 80s, was beneath us’: Boris Johnson, centre front, at Eton. Photograph: Richard Shymansky from News Syndication/Gillman & Soame UK Ltd / News Licensing
Why public schoolboys like me and Boris Johnson aren’t
fit to run our country
Boris Johnson,
centre front, at Eton.
Our elite
schools foster emotional austerity and fierce clique loyalty. Here a privately
educated writer of the prime minister’s generation reveals the lasting damage
public schools do
Scroll down
for a Q&A with Richard Beard
Richard
Beard
Sun 8 Aug
2021 07.00 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/aug/08/public-schoolboys-boris-johnson-sad-little-boys-richard-beard?CMP=fb_gu&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR0u-1O8sYoxjXRP0qkEL9ImB_5ecE0AcmsJKwqemcxWrUANP_bHQOPYnmM#Echobox=1628416840
I had a
feeling I couldn’t immediately place. I wanted to go out but wasn’t allowed.
Shelves were emptying at the nearest supermarket and instead of fresh fruit and
vegetables I was eating British comfort food – sausages and mash, pie and
beans. My freedom to make decisions like an adult was limited. I wondered when
I’d see my mum again.
March 2020,
first week of the first lockdown: I was 53 years old and felt like I was back
at boarding school. Which wouldn’t have mattered, but for the fact that at a
time of national crisis my generation of boarding-school boys found themselves
in charge.
My first
night at Pinewood school was two days after my eighth birthday in January 1975.
A term earlier David Cameron had left his family home for Heatherdown
preparatory school in Berkshire, while also in 1975, at the age of 11,
Alexander Johnson was sent to board at Ashdown House in East Sussex. This means
I know how two of the past three British prime ministers were treated as
children and the kind of men their schools wanted to make of them. I know
neither of these men personally but I do know that they spent the formative
years of their childhood in boarding schools being looked after by adults who
didn’t love them, because I did too. And if the character of our leaders
matters then I’m in possession of important information.
At the age
of 13, after prep school, Cameron and Johnson progressed to Eton. I went on to
Radley College near Oxford. The exact school picked out by the parents didn’t
really matter, because the experience was designed to produce a shared mindset.
They were paying for a similar upbringing with a similar intended result: to
establish our credentials for the top jobs in the country. We were being
trained for leadership, or if not to lead then to earn. The most convincing
reason to go to a private school remains to have gone to a private school, with
the prizes that are statistically likely to follow.
It is
noticeable, and often noticed, that something immature and boyish survives in
men like Cameron and Johnson as adults. They can never quite carry off the role
of grownup, or shake a suspicion that they remain fans of escapades without
consequences. They look confident of not being caught, or not being punished if
they are. Cameron has his boyishly unlined face and Johnson his urchin’s
unbrushed hair, and his arch schoolboy’s vocabulary.
But what
kind of boyhood was it, in our paid-for rooms in those repurposed mansions that
housed our schools? What of the distant past still works in us as adults and
can we pass on the harm to others? Are we the right people to steer the
country, either clear of trouble or in the direction of sunlit uplands? The
answer to these questions depends on lessons learned at an impressionable age.
Unless, of course, we learned nothing. And no one pays hundreds of pounds a
term, even in the late 70s, to learn nothing.
I remember the feeling of desolate homesickness:
abruptly, several times a year, our attachments to home and family were broken
One of the
first things we learned – or felt – at prep school was a deep, emotional
austerity, starting from the moment the parents drove away. That first night,
and on other nights to come, the little men in ties and jackets reverted to the
little children they really were – in name-taped pyjamas with a single soft toy
(also name-taped), blubbing themselves to sleep and wetting their beds.
I remember
the feeling of desolate homesickness: abruptly, several times a year, our
attachments to home and family were broken. We lost everything – parents, pets,
toys, younger siblings – and we could cry if we liked but no one would help us.
So that later in life, when we saw other people cry, we felt no great need to
go to their aid. The sad and the weak were wrong to show their distress, and we
learned to despise the children who blubbed for their mummies. The cure was to
stop crying and forget that life beyond the dormitories and classrooms existed.
Concentrate instead on the games pitches and the dining hall and the
headmaster’s study. By force of will we made ourselves complicit in a
collective narrowing of vision.
In Richard
Denton’s BBC documentary Public School, filmed at Radley College in 1979, the
Radley headmaster Dennis Silk tells a daunted audience of new boys that they’re
about to pick up “the right habits for life”. Among these habits was cultivation
of the stiff upper lip. We could be ourselves – homesick, vulnerable, lovelorn
and frightened – or, with practice at putting up a front, we could pretend to
embody the idealised national character. We could perform being loyal and
robust and self-reliant. Wearing a commendably brave face we could distance our
feelings, growing the “hardness of heart of the educated”, as identified by
Mahatma Gandhi from his dealings with the English ruling class.
This wasn’t
healthy. In her 2015 book, Boarding School Syndrome, psychoanalyst Joy
Schaverien describes a condition now sufficiently recognised to merit therapy
groups and an emergent academic literature. The symptoms are wide-ranging but
include, ingrained from an early age, emotional detachment and dissociation,
cynicism, exceptionalism, defensive arrogance, offensive arrogance, cliquism,
compartmentalisation, guilt, grief, denial, strategic emotional misdirection
and stiff-lipped stoicism. Fine fine fine. We’re all doing fine.
We adapted
to survive. We postured and lied, whatever it took. Abandoned, alone, England’s
future leaders needed to fit in whatever the cost, and we were not needy, no
sir. We could live without, and we convinced ourselves early that we had no
great need of love, in either direction. Acting like a grownup meant needing no
one.
Discouraged
from crying out for help, frightened of complaining or sneaking, we developed a
gangster loyalty to self-contained cliques, scared to death of being cast out
as we had been from home. Of being cast out again. In the absence of family we
kept in with our chums, but also ingratiated ourselves with the teachers: God
knows what might come next after abandonment if we kicked up a fuss.
From the
teachers we learned about mockery and sarcasm as techniques for social control,
with our boy hierarchies regulated by banter, ranging from a sharp remark to a
knuckle in the crown of the head. Attack was the best form of defence, and
ridicule was honed as a deeply conservative force, controlling by means of
fear, either of being the joke or of not getting the joke. There was plenty of
fear to go round. The author Paul Watkins, in his memoir Stand Before Your God,
remembers at Eton the huge amount of energy, in the time of Cameron and
Johnson, that went into “teasing and ignoring people”. “I felt a harshness that
I’d never felt before.”
George
Orwell, during his time at prep school, remembers being ridiculed out of an
interest in butterflies. The banter that day must have been immense. Nothing
was sacred, and once we found out what another boy took most seriously we were
ready to strike, when necessary, at its core. Our most effective defence was
therefore to act as if we took nothing very seriously at all.
We learned
to stay detached, some would say cold – “You had to have a coldness in
yourself,” writes Watkins. “Of all the rules I learned and later threw away,
this one I kept. If you did not know it, you could get hurt very badly at a
place like Eton.”
Later in
life, these unwritten school rules could infect every type of relationship.
Prematurely detached from our parents, we had a preference for abandoning
others before getting abandoned ourselves. Jump ship. Also, to be on the safe
side, keep an emotional reserve.
Prof Diana
Leonard, who established the Centre for Research on Education and Gender at the
University of London, published research in 2009 showing that boys from
single-sex schools were more likely to be divorced or separated from their
partner by their early 40s. And mental health professionals, like Schaverien,
are convincing in their explanation that those years of disconnection mean we
expect too much, our fantasies rarely surviving contact with reality. Making up
for lost time, for example, we want sex but come to resent women for our
weakness for sex – as adults, erotic dependence becomes a new form of
vulnerability to be doubted and denied. Why couldn’t women be more like our
boyhood Athena posters?
At school
we tried not to feel foolish, angry, loving, stupid, sad, dependent, excited or
demanding. We were made wary of feeling, full stop. By comparison, children not
blessed with a private education must be fizzing with uncontrolled emotions and
therefore insufferably weak. How did the schools teach us this sense of
superiority? The language was always chipping away – in the documentary Public
School the boys casually refer to “the lower orders”, as if to a species
difference, reptiles considering insects. In our isolation we learned that we
were special. Everyone else was less special and often stupid – school was
where we went, aged eight, to learn to despise other people.
Cameron,
Johnson and I absorbed attitudes once familiar to Orwell, who was confronted
with some realities about his Eton education when documenting the living
conditions of working-class households in Lancashire and Yorkshire. “Common
people seemed almost sub-human,” Orwell writes in The Road to Wigan Pier. “They
had coarse faces, hideous accents, and gross manners… and if they got half the
chance they would insult you in brutal ways.” Alien and dangerous, the working
class evoked “an attitude of sniggering superiority punctuated by bursts of
vicious hatred”.
Anyone
underestimating the durability of this divide should consider the evidence of
the Radley College swimming pool, circa 1980. A story used to circulate that
the pool was a yard shorter than a standard pool, so that no local swimming
club would want to use it for practice or competitive events. Christopher
Hibbert’s history of Radley, No Ordinary Place, corrects this myth: the pool
was deliberately designed a yard longer. The same reasoning applied. The locals
shouldn’t be encouraged. Typically, in a summer term ending in early July, we
didn’t swim in it much anyway.
In the
early 80s, Radley’s non-teaching staff were known as College Servants. We had
cleaners, chefs, groundsmen, bit-part players and comic mechanicals. They
represented the proles, the plebs, the oiks, the yokels, the townies and the
crusties (a term Johnson continued to use 40 years later). Our special language
had its range of words to set these unfamiliar animals apart, meaning people
not like us, and if you didn’t know the language you were probably one of them.
As Orwell doubles-down in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “The proles are not human
beings.”
In his
autobiography, For the Record, David Cameron admits that about Brexit he “did
not fully anticipate the strength of feeling that would be unleashed both
during the referendum and afterwards”. Of course he didn’t. Strong feelings
were involved, and also the common people. He was floundering in a pair of
blind spots, to emotion and the British public. He gorged on a double helping
of ignorance undisturbed since his schooldays.
Looking now
at old school photos, I find I can count the darker faces on the fingers of one
hand. At Pinewood we had two brothers recently arrived from Nigeria, and the
son of an Indian doctor who lived not far from my parents in Swindon. The only
other dark faces we saw were in our Saturday-night films, in Zulu and Young
Winston, where savage natives were subdued by the civilising force of white
British warriors. Did that turn us into racists? Yes, I think it did.
In the
holidays I’d go to the post office on Victoria Road, to collect Mum’s child
benefit, and when the British Asian post office worker stamped the book I was
immensely pleased with myself for acting as if he were just like anyone else.
At Radley one boy in our year was possibly mixed race – we didn’t really know
but mocked him for it anyway – and the two of us played in the same rugby team.
In my end-of-year sports reports I make feeble gags about Brownian motion and
his “blacking” of other players. I don’t even know what that means, beyond the
racial slur. The supervising editor of the school magazine, a teacher, saw
nothing in need of editorial attention. And why would he? The racism was
institutional – with the evidence currently available online in the school’s
digitised archive.
Girls,
swots, oiks, wogs and queers were synonymous with weakness, to be joshed
without mercy by the strong
I find the
son of the Indian doctor on LinkedIn – Ravi is successful in business, though
he asks me not to use his real name. Whatever I think about private schools and
racism, what does he think? Initially he’s cautious. He writes back that
“frankly there are some very bad memories of that time that are very painful”.
As
first-generation immigrants, he tells me later by phone, his Indian parents
wanted to give him a good education. Overall, Pinewood was “pretty decent”; his
public school less so. He asks me not to name it.
“I was
called a wog and a Paki. There was the National Front.”
In his
school as at mine, public speaking was encouraged – good for the confidence –
and one boy was “passionate about the National Front”. Ravi regrets sitting in
the audience and at the end of a hate speech clapping politely, demonstrating
the good manners he’d been educated to value. There was also racism from the
teachers, in remarks that casually encompassed Ravi’s father and family.
Our
schoolboy vocabulary, with its stock of disparaging words, expanded to include
everyone who deserved our scorn, like poofs and homos. As long as we weren’t girls,
swots, oiks, wogs or queers, we could be jolly decent chaps. All those other
categories were synonymous with weakness, to be joshed without mercy by the
strong. And if a boy struggled with the spontaneity of banter, he could
memorise jokes about the Irish, who were unbelievably thick. We laughed at
anyone not like us, and the repertoire on repeat included gags about slaves and
nuns and women hurdlers. One September, after a boy came back from a holiday in
Australia, we had jokes about Aborigines. We internalised this poison like a
vaccine, later making us insensitive as witnesses to all but the most vicious
instances of discrimination. Everyone who was not us, a boy at a private
boarding school from the late 70s to the early 80s, was beneath us. Obviously,
we too were a minority, but of all the minorities we were the most important.
Of course we were. We’d end up running the country.
Single-minded
ambition became acceptable as a way of deadening the self. Get elected
president of the debating society. Edit the school magazine. Lobby to become
head of house, head prefect. Join a milkround company, get a column on a
national newspaper, write a book. For the worst afflicted, at the high end of
the greasy pole, become prime minister. The drive for success was an ongoing
plea for attention and affection, a condition described by Lucille Iremonger in
her book Fiery Chariot as the Phaeton complex. In Greek mythology Phaeton was a
frustrated child of the sun god Helios, who insists on driving his father’s
chariot just for one day. He crashes the chariot, turning much of Africa into
desert.
According
to Iremonger, a hunger for power is the tragic fate of children abandoned by
their parents, and she developed her theory from a study of British prime
ministers between 1809 and 1940. No prizes for guessing where most of them were
educated, and many former boarders can be recognised as Phaetons.
In his book
The Old Boys, David Turner has the statistics for the “highly disproportionate
share” of public school alumni in the top jobs of the UK. These figures come
from 2014, to include boys at school at the same time as me in their
middle-aged professional prime: “seven in 10 senior judges, six in 10 senior
officers in the armed forces, and more than half the permanent secretaries,
senior diplomats and leading media figures”. Seventeen out of 27 members of
Johnson’s full cabinet in 2020 went to private school. Of the more visible
recent political buccaneers, leading English private schools have sent out Rees-Mogg,
Hunt, Mitchell, Cash, Redwood and Cummings: English boys with English minds.
A follow-up
report by the Sutton Trust and Social Mobility Commission, Elitist Britain
2019, paints a mostly unchanged picture. Private schools account for nearly 70%
of the judges and barristers in the country. To this list can be added more
than 50% of bishops and ministers of state and lord lieutenants and the England
cricket team, these doors not even half open to anyone else.
Johnson was
any boy who started boarding in 1975, only more so, because not growing up was
openly a part of his act
When
deciding on a private school education for his children, my dad must have
envisaged useful connections for life that seem psychologically plausible as
well as professionally desirable: a segregated elite united by a common
uncommon experience. Cameron surrounded himself with like-minded people – of
the six men who worked on the Conservative Party Manifesto in 2014, five had
been to Eton. The other was an old boy of St Paul’s. Sonia Purnell, Johnson’s
biographer, says Johnson doesn’t have friends – his younger brother was best
man at his first wedding – but he knows what kind of person makes him feel
comfortable. He remains loyal to boys’ school boys like his friend Darius Guppy
(who famously asked Johnson for the address of a fellow journalist so he could
have him beaten up) and Cummings, rebels but public school rebels. Or loyal at
least for a while. Once Johnson and Cummings fell out, each was right to be
frightened of the other. Their schooling was more powerful in them than any
self-projection as icon or iconoclast: they knew how to hurt their own.
In her
biography, Purnell calls Johnson “an original – the opposite of a stereotype,
the exception to the rule”. Not quite. He was any boy who started at a private
boarding school in 1975, only more so because not growing up was openly a
feature of his performance. He flaunted shamelessly what the rest of us tried
to conceal: he was chaotic, unformed, cruel, slapdash, essentially frivolous.
When he messed up he was just a boy, with his boyishly ruffled hair, and
expected to be excused.
Cameron
likewise turned his back on the mess he’d made with the serenity of a public
school boy whose ancestors had been public school boys too. Between the lectern
and the door of yet another temporary home Cameron hummed a happy tune,
pretending to be fine. All is well, thank you and goodnight. Possibly he’d been
a bit naughty, but luckily England was arranged in such a way as to protect his
own best interests. Of course it was. Boys like us had arranged it.
In the end
we can’t take anything seriously.
In earlier
generations, Orwell and others like him were exposed by war and other
calamities to a seriousness that grew their stunted selves and tempered the
isolated and ironic cult of an English private education. They were goaded by
events into compassion, so that sooner or later, Orwell believed, even in “a
land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly”, England
would brush aside the obvious injustice of the public schools.
The wait
goes on. Maybe in 40 years’ time, assuming the country survives Brexit and
Covid, a more enlightened nation might look back on Cameron and Johnson as a
self-erasing supernova, a final bright flare and a burning out, the dying of
the public school light in a burst of corruption and incompetence so
spectacular the glimmer will be visible from space.
Anyone
betting on that outcome, at any point in the past 600 years, would have lost.
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